The Search & Preview Style Gallery

The Search & Preview Style Gallery holds all of the XSLT Templates and CSS style sheets used by the various Search & Preview Web parts. From here, they are available from all sites in the collection. A collection of predefined templates is supplied with the solution—often several templates are provided for each part to support each of several different ways in which each part is typically used.
When configuring a Web part that uses a template, you are able to select from among the templates currently saved at the appropriate location of the gallery. Likewise, if you decide to create your own templates, then you must save your templates in the correct folder of the gallery.

The Search & Preview gallery is called “Search & Preview Styles”; it contains the following files and folders:

• Best Bets: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the Best Bets Web Part
• Common: a folder that contains common sections of XSLT code which are imported and shared by several different templates and web parts.
• High Confidence: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the High Confidence Web Part
• Search Box: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the Search & Preview Search Box Web control.
• Search Dialog: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the Search & Preview Search Dialog Web Part.
• Search Hint: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the Search Hint Web Part
• Search Result: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the Search & Preview SharePoint Search Result Web Part.
• Search Summary: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the Search & Preview Search Summary Web Part.
• Search Tabs: a folder that contains XSLT files used by the Search & Preview Search Tabs Web part.
• OntolicaSearch.css: the default CSS file intended for use with search forms and result pages.
• XML.xsl: a “neutral” style sheet that passes XML unmodified to the output.

• custom CSS files: if you have created any custom CSS files, then they will also be listed a the top level of the Search & Preview style gallery.
When you install and deploy Search & Preview, the default templates are actually stored on disk at each server. However, when you save custom templates, they are stored in the database to ensure that identical versions will always be available to all servers in the farm. The gallery, as presented in SharePoint, combines templates from both sources. One reason for the mechanism of keeping the default templates on disk is that it helps to make sure that they can be modified as needed when deploying updates or upgrades of Search & Preview. This is why you should never overwrite any of the standard templates delivered with Search & Preview. If you do this, then you risk having your customizations deleted later when you update, upgrade or re-install.
There are several ways to get to the Style Gallery, including:

• When configuring a Web part that uses a template, a link to the relevant gallery sub-folder is provided among the part’s XSLT Template settings.

• Select Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings and then select Search & Preview Styles under the Galleries heading.